Data is assuming increasing importance in our daily lives. Both individuals and businesses are being pressured by internal and external agencies to backup their data and ensure high availability and continuous accessibility of the information. Accepting the need for backup and enforcing backup, in this context, will draw our attention to the way in which data and information influences and shapes our lives and how important it is that we preserve our digital assets for our future generations. This effort is important to everyone, who has felt the need to backup information and preserve the digital assets of their organization. It is entirely in synchronization with the knowledge era in which we live and work.

Good backup plans provide a layered security to information and a multiple level recovery protocol. What does this mean?

Layered security: Layered security constructs are built bottom up. Data is encrypted at the point of generation. It travels encrypted over the network to prevent unauthorized listeners from making sense of the data. It is stored encrypted at rest and is made accessible, only to authorized users on the network –using elaborate user management protocols and usage tracking systems that include user logs, activity alerts, alarms and reports.

Multi-level recovery: For multi level recovery purposes, data is made highly available using mirroring and replication technologies. Data transmitted to the primary server locally or remotely is mirrored and replicated to multiple, geographically dispersed servers for disaster recovery purposes. As a result, data can be recovered to a local system from the primary server or secondary server(s)—hot sites and disaster recovery sites–that may be located onsite or offsite. The data may be recoverable in “bare metal” state to same or similar hardware or an entirely different type of hardware.

Data backup plans make a difference in the lives of individuals and bring value for the buck to businesses. In a world where man-made and natural disasters are more common than we think, data backup is a necessity rather than a luxury. If you are yet to experience an outage or face the loss of your precious digital repositories, you may hesitate on the brink of making a decision about backing up your data. But, for those who have lost their digital assets, backup will almost be a religion. Why wait for disaster to strike before you learn to backup for just such a contingency? Explore your backup options now! Celebrate with a commitment to backup!